MMOs and game design

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moderation

I guess you could see this post as thematically related to yesterday’s, where I was talking about sexism in gaming. Last night Channel 4 News (which is a reasonably well respected outlet here) aired a piece about sexual harassment in Habbo Hotel. If you haven’t heard of Habbo it’s probably because you aren’t a teenager or don’t have a child that age.

I missed the report but essentially one of their reporters posed as an 11 year old girl while playing Habbo for a couple of months and was inundated with cyber sex, porny chat, and cartoon boys following her to her room and emoting that they were having sex with her. I suspect strongly that this mostly involves teens harassing each other. It reminded me a bit of a report I read recently about teen sexting in schools, where they focussed on how teen girls in particular are subjected to a barrage of requests over social media to send pictures of themselves naked, perform sex acts, etc etc.

So this is likely more of a wider cultural issue than gaming culture per se. Still, a game aimed at minors which sells itself on being a safe environment has to go a bit further than saying “Hey, it’s what they do at school too.”

Providing a safe social environment for all players is a top priority in Habbo Hotel which is why all Habbo Hotels are staffed by trained, adult moderators who take action against wrongdoers and assist users with any questions they may have.

They also suggest parents keep an eye on what their children are doing online and make sure they keep lines of communication open so that their kids feel comfortable telling them if anything that made them feel bad happened. Which is all great advice.

I’ve also no reason to doubt that they have a process in place where players can complain of harassment and have a moderator step in to help them either. (We don’t know if the reporter tried reporting anyone.) None of this will save them when their main investor pulls out due to bad publicity and the main retailers decide to stop stocking Habbo Hotel gift cards. Although they do also operate in a ton of other countries so there is that.

What’s more worrying for MMO operators in the teen/child space is that this starts a rush panic. Parents or investors who may have assumed that virtual worlds were more policed THAN IS FEASIBLY EVER POSSIBLE might just pull the plug.

Asking to have every single message moderated isn’t practical. It’s barely viable to ask for every channel to be moderated. And they do claim to do this:

"Habbo’s moderation and safeguarding procedures includes employing more than 225 moderators, tracking some 70m lines of conversation globally every day on a 24/7 basis. These moderators cover all time-zones and the multiple languages in which Habbo users converse."

That’s vastly more moderated than WoW, for example. And yet, you can log into Warcraft and the only unwanted texts you might get would be about gold selling. I think there is room to wonder about their moderation, if there really are chat rooms called ‘sexy stripclub’.

I don’t really have an answer for this one other than either watch your kids like hawks online, get them to stick to games which don’t allow free text chat, find a game that allows private servers where they can play with people they know or parents/ schools have vetted, or have them play games which aren’t dominated by teens.

It is definitely going to be worrying for Habbo though that parental expectations might be for totally impossible levels of safety.

So why are AAA MMOs not as bad as virtual worlds with respect to sex chat

The only game I can think of that was as sex dominated as this sounds was Second Life, and even there it sounded relatively easy to get away from the cybering. So maybe there’s something about ungamified virtual worlds that just descends to the lowest common denominator.

Sad but true. I think any future ventures along these lines will have to require real names or allow private servers where the groups running the game can impose their own gatekeeping.

Or maybe there is something about gamers and gaming MMOs that focusses interactions in other directions. Maybe gamers are generally more interested in progression than what’s in your pants iRL. I also suspect that having a mix of ages in a gaming demographic tends to make a space safer rather than riskier – while there is the possibility of paedophiles, there is also the (larger) possibility of adults who will keep an eye out for more vulnerable members of the community, plus parents who will tend to play with their kids in the game (which I think would require more fortitude than I possess for Habbo).

This won’t be the last we hear of this story, I suspect. It’s been bubbling under for a long time, and this may be the start of a very different turn for MMOs.

I very rarely step in to moderate comments on the blog, because it’s very rarely necessary. But I thought it might be interesting to lay the process open for discussion.

1. Allowing a comment in the first place. WordPress allows various options for moderating comments – you can let them all go through, moderate each one individually, only allow comments from people who have signed in, etc.

My main goal is to not allow spam because I find it annoying. But once I trust someone not to spam, I don’t especially want them to have to wait for moderation to see their comments appear. So the option I picked was to get people to sign in (you can just put a spoof email address if you want, it’s for id, not because I care about your email) but once you have had a comment approved on your sign in, anything more should just go through automatically.

2. Moderating comments that have been posted. Like I say, it’s rarely been necessary. I have a few rules though, which have been unwritten until now.

No personal attacks. No offensive sexist/ racism/ homophobic/ group attacks. I’m probably quite lenient with these as long as comments are relevant and let people sail quite close to the wind, in the interests of lively debates.

let people know that their comment has been moderated, and why. If you do get a comment moderated, the offending phrase/s will be removed and replaced by something like <<moderated for racist language, please don’t do that>>

No dodgy links. I do check links that people put on their comments, if I’m not happy that one is kosher, it goes. And by that I mean advertising something irrelevant or looks as though it might be virus ridden. Links to relevant blogs or blog posts are great.

These aren’t up for debate, although please speak up if you do find something offensive.

Question: What about adverts which are also relevant comments?

People get smarter and sometimes I get comments which actually are relevant to the post and the discussion, but also used as adverts to link to commercial pages/ blogs. Do you want to see those comments, or would you rather that they were moderated out?